In A Nutshell
by Kirstee
Summary: When Spike is sent from the confines of Wolfram and Hart to his own past, what will he do? What must be done to return to his own time?


Name: In A Nutshell  
  
By: Kirstee  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own them, blah blah blah. Joss owns all, you know the drill.  
  
Description: When Spike is sent from the confines of Wolfram and Hart to his own past, what will he do? What must be done to return to his own time?  
  
A/N- Yes I know I'm starting yet ANOTHER fic! Sorry, I promise I will try to have another chapter of Belief in Right up by the end of the week and maybe a another chapter of It's About The Power. Which I swear I haven't given up on! I just had to reread the books ( But I just had to write this one out, its been an idea I have had since Hell Bound.  
  
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Spike roamed the hallways of Wolfram and Hart. It was hard to tell exactly where you were going in this place. Almost all the hallways looked the same, all painted a dark blue with hints of beige. Beige was supposed to be soothing. You could put your money on it that if you were here it was not to be soothed.  
  
'Well another day well spent annoying the neighbors' he thought sarcastically to himself.  
  
He had just come back from Angel's office, where he and that Eve chippy had been in a heated debate over Angel's recent staking of a powerful and mighty wealthy vampire.  
  
"Janson was a benefactor of Wolfram and Hart! Do you not remember my little speech about killing every single client?" Eve had shrilled out  
  
"Sorry I tend to block out your voice most of the time. besides he was A VAMPIRE you know with the killing?! Do you remember my mission statement 'Help the hopeless'? Well Janson didn't fall under the 'hopeless' part!" Angel retorted.  
  
Eve rolled her eyes and crossed her arms all while giving Angel an icy glare.  
  
Spike had added some comical side notes to the conversation, which eventually led to both of them yelling at him to "Shut up and GET OUT!"  
  
With a smirk he had disappeared and ended up outside Angel's office.  
  
He now walked along the now nearly deserted hallways. He turned at the corner into another long hallway. He knew this one ended in the Science Lab.  
  
No doubt Fred was still there, her pretty little head working double time on some complex math equation. Not many things impressed him, but this girl's smarts did.  
  
He shoved his hands in his pockets and wrapped his duster tightly around him. He did this involuntarily now, protecting himself from the outside world.  
  
This world. The one he had been pushed back into. Now two years later he understood a little bit of what Buffy must have felt like when she was taken out of heaven and put back in this world. Dying for something you know is right, to have the world so crystal clear, even just for a minute, and then being even more confused by life's little plays.  
  
He continued down the hallway and saw a lawyer leave his office, he was looking down at his watch and passed right through Spike's right side.  
  
The lawyer never even looked up. He just continued down the hall.  
  
Spike growled "Damn lawyers"  
  
This was the last place he wanted to spend the rest of eternity. Stuck with his grandsire in House 'O' Lawyer.  
  
But there were bright spots, like Fred. He walked through the lab door, no need to open it. At least there were a couple things about being a ghost that didn't suck.  
  
He looked around the nearly dark lab, most of the lights were off except for Fred's office at the top.  
  
He made his way up there silently but was surprised when no one was in the room. He looked around the messy yet in an odd way organized office. The whiteboard behind her desk was filled to the top with math numbers and symbols, it even went onto the window a little.  
  
A small machine to his left buzzed. He hadn't seen it in her office before. A small green light on it blinked up at him. He cocked his head at it continued to sputter out the annoying sound.  
  
"Hello" a voice came from behind him. He jumped a little.  
  
"Bloody Hell woman what was that for?" he said to her, his face just a tad flushed from being surprised.  
  
"Payback" she said with a smile.  
  
He smirked at her.  
  
Her arms were full with folders that were bulging with papers.  
  
She set the folder down on the desk and looked up at Spike.  
  
"So what's this then?" Spike he nodded over to the little machine "Some complex machine that could take over the earth? Possibly a backup corporealizer?" he asked with hope.  
  
"It's a dehumidifier" she said as she looked down at a paper on her desk.  
  
"Oh" Spike said a little sheepish.  
  
"They're testing mold down in the lab now for some after effects of some magical whozer-what that happened in like Africa or something. And I'm trying to keep the mold from growing in my office" she said without looking up.  
  
"Okay" Spike said. "What are we working on now?"  
  
Fred looked up from her paper which was now covered in numbers.  
  
Spike raised an eyebrow at her.  
  
"I don't know really, its just an inkling . You know that circle that made Pavayne corporeal?"  
  
Spike nodded and remembered that bastard, he suppressed a growl that had risen in his throat.  
  
"Anyways, if you remember, there were symbols around the outer rim, Wesley had told me that they are used in resurrection spells, and since technically we were bringing flesh back we needed to think of it in terms as a resurrection but after Angel had beat Pavayne and after you saved me I took some time to really look at the symbols and I recognized them from something. it took me a few days to figure out exactly where. They're not words, they're consonant representations of a mathematical transfiguration formula. Just like for the portals in Pylea"  
  
"Pylea?" Spike asked.  
  
"Demon dimension" Fred said as she walked over to the whiteboard "I was trapped there for 5 years, its actually Lorne's home dimension"  
  
"Oh" Spike said.  
  
"Well back when I was in Pylea I was, to put it loosely, a little bit crazy. I had written all over the walls with these formulas and representations trying to figure out the wording that would open a portal and send me back here. A year or two after I had escaped being a slave Cordy came into Pylea and Angel and Co. came to save her, I helped with the whole portal thing and we came back to L.A."  
  
She put down her marker that she had been writing with. Spike was sitting on the small couch in the office, watching the girl tell her tale, it was actually quite interesting.  
  
Fred turned around and looked at Spike. "I remember the night I came back, They took me back to the hotel where they ran Angel Investigations. I was so excited, I was home back in the land of freedom and tacos"  
  
Spike smiled at her.  
  
"Ok I've gone off the topic, but what I am trying to do is figure out exactly what these representations mean, Maybe it could even help with a whole new way to recorporealize!"  
  
Fred said as she grinned over at him. She seemed to be really excited about this idea.  
  
"Well if that's the case then I'll be here to support you" Spike said getting up and standing in front of Fred.  
  
She smiled at him. "Well I don't know what you can do because right now its just trying to solve the equations"  
  
She uncapped her marker and chewed on the end as she looked at the whiteboard.  
  
Fred stared at the board while Spike stared at Fred for several minutes until Fred let out and "Oh!"  
  
She rushed over to the board and moved the 2 over to the upper right side and used the Transitive property of Equation to solve it.  
  
"Aha!" she said.  
  
She rushed over to her desk wear one of Wesley's volumes lay, she hurriedly flipped through the pages until she stopped on one halfway through.  
  
She carefully scanned the page and pointed her finger at one thing then rushed back to her board.  
  
She wrote down what she had now figured 43 = K or P  
  
"This could take awhile" Spike said  
  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- A few hours later-  
  
Fred was still slaving away in her office, Spike had left about an hour ago.  
  
Fred squinted again at the whiteboard, all the numbers seemed to swim together. She took off her glasses and looked at the board again. Now everything was blurry.  
  
She looked back at her desk, the papers were stacked miles high.  
  
She wasn't going to be able to finish this now, what with her being so tired.  
  
So she stumbled across the office to her couch.  
  
"I'll just take a quick nap" she muttered to herself as she turned off the light and layed her head down on one of the fluffy pillows.  
  
Spike watched Fred turn her light off from the ground floor of the lab.  
  
What he wouldn't give for a smoke he thought to himself. But being a ghost it would be damn near impossible.  
  
He strolled over to the circle that Fred had been talking of before. He bent down and looked at the archaic symbols.  
  
It meant absolutely nothing to him. He couldn't figure out the hell Fred could make anything out of 'em.  
  
Looking back on it he really didn't know why he stepped in the center of the ring, he was just kind of drawn to it.  
  
Maybe if he had seen the glowing rock and African mold then he would have stopped, maybe got someone down here to figure out what was up.  
  
But no he stepped in the circle, oblivious to the glowing objects on the table.  
  
He stood there for a few seconds. He was about to step back out when he felt his body start to hum.  
  
He tried to get out right away, he wasn't stupid, he knew when trouble was happening.  
  
Except there seemed to be something blocking him from the outside.  
  
"Bloody Hell" he said as a brilliant blue light enveloped him. It shot through his whole body and he felt a pain not unlike the one the amulet had torn into him.  
  
He screamed and the last image he saw before blacking out was Fred's office light flicking on.  
  
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A/N- Hope you like the intro chapter! 


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